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Chapter Ten: Continuing the Conversation

“I have invited you to join with me in imagining a theology of singleness for the meanwhile to be like a tapestry in the making. An accurate telling of time acts as the indispensable longitudinal warp whose tension provides the project with its necessary structural integrity. Various threads of theological retrieval are then gently teased apart before they are wefted over and under, around and above that foundational warp. As the individual strands slowly, but surely come together as part of an integrated whole, a form begins to take shape.

And yet, the masterpiece remains incomplete. There is still much work to be done. Still more threads of weft to be interwoven. Still more detail to be envisioned and applied. Still more artisans whose collaborative skills are required for the task at hand. That is to say, what I have proposed herein is only the beginning of a (re)discovery of singleness’ meaning.

As such, this conversation now concludes with the consideration of a number of reforming and reinforcing insights that will prove vital to the fostering of an ongoing one. Or, in keeping with our metaphor, this final chapter offers some important textural guidance for the ongoing crafting of a comprehensively biblical, theologically faithful, and pastorally nourishing tapestry of Christian singleness for the contemporary church.”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Chapter Nine: Making the Meaning

“A final aspect of singleness’s meaning in demonstrating the teleologically hopeful expansive nature of human sexuality is well-introduced by Charles Williams, an early twentieth-century theologian. Williams hypothesized that a notion of sacramentality may exist within any authentically human experience and expression of love, sex, beauty, attraction, ardor, and so on. He suggests that iconic significance lies “in any relation of man into which the element of sincere and simple at- traction enters,”1 whether the object of such attraction be one’s spouse, nature, sport, or even stamp-collecting! Such significance is disclosed by the sense in which it permits the individual to perceive, even momentarily, “the very Presence of God—not manifested in his full glory, but more fully and universally manifested than in any other manner.”2 The one who “not in any sense for himself or to himself, is surrendered to an entire ardor cannot be said to be far from the Kingdom which will manifest Itself at Its chosen time.”3

If William’s contention is true, then the Christian person’s sense of rightly ordered and expressed sexual ardor or attraction may privilege them with an admittedly ephemeral, but nonetheless authentically sacramental perception of eternity in the eschatological now. Such existential experience, arising from the deep longings inspired by one’s created sexual nature—whether manifested in marital sexual intimacy, or its faithful direction toward celibate singleness—might be said to orient the individual toward a longing for the beauty of the divine presence. It might provide a momentary glimpse of the teleologically perfected intimacy with Christ—and so also each other—that yet awaits.

Such an argument directs us once again toward a more expansive understanding of human sexuality’s purposive character than is often typified in contemporary evangelical discourse, and especially discourse in relation to singleness.”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Chapter Eight: Telling the Time

“The proposition that God is the sovereign Creator who actively fashioned this world and all who inhabit it is fundamental to the Christian faith. As a doctrinal premise, it provides robust grounding for appeals to “nature” in the determination of how human creatures ought to conduct ourselves in this creation. And yet, equally fundamental to the Christian faith is the conviction that this creation has always had a teleological goal, a divinely ordered end to which it is being inexorably drawn (e.g., Is 65:17; Rom 8:18-21; Rev 21:1-4). Not only is Jesus the centerpiece of creation’s telos, but the resurrected Christ is its first fruits. As Oliver O’Donovan contends, it is in him that we perceive the “historic telos of the origin, that which creation is intended for and that which it points and strives towards.”1

However, the conviction that creation has always had a teleological destiny, accomplished—though not yet finally—in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, introduces a tension of continuity and discontinuity into life in the here and now. Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, and resurrection are divine actions of both innovation and continuation. In the first instance, the Messiah has not simply disclosed something more, something previously unperceived and hidden about what has always existed. Rather, he has actually executed something new in what exists. With his birth, life, death, and resurrection real and novel change has even now been enacted within the trajectory of this creation. And yet, this christological disruption remains entirely related to and consistent with what has always been. As Andrew Errington concludes, while it is “something profoundly new, it is . . . [not new] in the sense of being wholly unrelated to what has come before.”2 Jesus’ creaturely birth affirms the goodness of God’s creation. Jesus’ creaturely death secures the redemption of God’s creation. Jesus’ new-creaturely resurrection testifies to the transformation of God’s creation. The end is both different to the beginning, and yet teleologically consistent with it.

Such a theological reality imbues ethical action in the present—the time that exists between the inauguration of the new creation and its final consummation—with some degree of complex ambiguity. It begs the question of what right living means for those who are already new creations in Christ (2 Cor 5:17), but whose ethical action, for now at least, is enacted within the realm of this current creation. Herein lies a creative and eschatological tension, even among those who commonly assent to the definitive significance of the resurrection for Christian moral action.”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Chapter Seven: Retrieving Singleness in Christian Theology

“Stanley Hauerwas argues that a similar failure has occurred in our theological description and resultant ethical approach to marriage, and particularly the romantic idealization to which Christians have subjected and even subjugated it. In clinging to marital and familial relationships as that which promises “to give our lives, if not purpose, at least an ‘anchor,’”1 Christians have fashioned them into “the paradigm of love and intimacy in our society.”2 However, the weight of such wondrous expectations is a heavy burden to bear, and sadly there “is ample evidence to suggest that such an understanding is disastrous both personally and politically.”3

Hauerwas contends that the contemporary church has also neglected its responsibility to undertake an urgent evaluation of its theological and ethical attitudes toward sex. He argues that the modern Christian approach to sex and sexuality is characterized by either a demystifying realism (i.e., “People, including young people, are going to ‘do it’—so try to keep the damage down”4), or a romantic idealization (i.e., the fundamental question about sex is “whether our sexual expressions are or are not expressions of love”5). In response to this dichotomy the church has come to celebrate sexuality as the arena of authentic human fulfilment. This is evidenced by the way “Christian ethicists have usually fallen over each other in their attempts to say good things about sex. God created us as sexual beings, they say. Adam needed Eve to be whole, they say.”6

Hauerwas argues that this positioning of sex, romance, marriage, and family as the ultimate locales of authentic love, intimacy, idealized personal pleasure, and individual fulfilment is far more at home within contemporary liberalism than an eschatological community defined and compelled by God’s teleological purposes in Jesus Christ. In failing to form a robust account of these institutions aligned with its distinctly eschatological identity and mission, the church has intentionally adopted or unwittingly absorbed secular relational and sexual norms. Too often “the flag of Christian sexual ethics has been a secular ethic baptized by the Christian church in the name of natural law”7 as if this makes it distinctly and fundamentally Christian.”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Chapter Six: Retrieving Singleness in Biblical Exegesis

“Commentators in the earlier Christian tradition recognized the key New Testament passages discussed in this chapter as proffering the makings of a theologically thick and pastorally nourishing construct of the unmarried Christian life. They consistently understood the Sadducean pericope not only to speak to the earthbound nature of marriage, but also the anticipatory celebration of the teleological destiny of the unmarried resurrected life. Meanwhile, the ethical exhortations in Paul’s seventh chapter of his first epistle to the church in Corinth were long understood to signal eschatological ambition and even urgency. The reception-history analysis of this chapter has revealed that from the outset, the church’s response to and engagement with these passages contains a great depth of eschatological riches that are ripe for retrieval.

Yet for all the exegetical accord of biblical commentators who affirm that in certain passages of Scripture “eschatology touch[es] upon single people in a special way,”1 the consequence and import of these texts has, over time, become more and more obscured and even minimized within evangelical orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Even where a passage such as 1 Corinthians 7:25-31—a text which Rodney Clapp argues commends the “superiority of singleness for awkward times”2—is understood as transoccasionally and eschatologically relevant, or when Matthew 22:23-33 (and its Synoptic parallels) speak to an eternity in which no Christian individual will be married to another (thereby granting the non-married earthly life a certain teleological dignity and integrity), its applicability within contemporary Christian ethical teaching often remains unexplored or even discounted altogether.

Such a contemporary propensity stands in stark contrast to the teachings of the historic church that enthusiastically espoused these passages of Scripture as pointing to great eschatological blessings inherent to the unmarried Christian life.”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Chapter Five: Retrieving Singleness in Church History

“While marriage itself was generally seen to remain an important and even necessary societal good [within the Early Church], the place of sex within marriage was a matter of far greater Christian contestation. Some spouses committed to total sexual abstinence. Others engaged in sexual intercourse for the specific purpose of procreation only (meaning that a husband and wife might sleep with each other only very rarely, in-between seasons of pregnancy). Many others ceased sexual relations altogether once the time for childbearing was past.

Such degrees and forms of Christian sexual chastity in marriage were determined by the sense in which marriage, or more specifically sex was understood to serve God’s purposes. On one hand, married Christians perceived a responsibility for their sexual conduct to stand in contrast to any pagan notions of sexual self-indulgence. Such extravagance was seen to have little place within the orderly and disciplined Christian life, as exemplified in Clement of Alexandria’s exhortation that married Christians not “put off modesty at the same time that you put off your clothes; because it is never right for the just man to divest himself of continence.”1

However, marital abstinence was also, and somewhat paradoxically, enacted in response to the anticipated eschatological—and even apocalyptic—disruption of the present social order. That is, though marriage was generally still considered to be the institution by which social stability and security might be ensured, not all early Christians took that to mean they had a duty to enthusiastically embrace it without qualification or hesitation. In particular, while ancient believers generally perceived marriage and procreation (and therefore, also sex) to be vitally significant within the present order, they wrestled with the sense in which participation in those things only served to actively and indefinitely perpetuate that same present order. Such an outcome did not sit comfortably with those whose eyes were fixed on the eschatological horizon.

In this light, virginity began to take on great theological significance as that which declined to facilitate a seemingly endless cycle of birth, life, and death within this present, fallen creation. By the middle of the second century, the Christian “continent body stood for a principle of reversibility; the flow of life itself could be halted . . . the means by which society was continued could be abandoned. Chastity announced the imminent approach of a ‘new creation.’”2 So it was that church fathers of the second and early third centuries were left in the position of needing to grapple with the celebration of sexual continence as a biblical ideal, while simultaneously upholding the honor of marriage as a key scriptural teaching and societal good.”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Chapter Four: The Value & Belonging of Christian Singleness

“So exists a palpable tension between the predominantly negative perception of the unmarried life discussed in the previous chapter, and certain biblical passages which indicate at least some instances of singleness are replete with some sort of godly value. In order to navigate this tension, the contemporary discourse has sought to distinguish (so-called) legitimate Christian singleness from illegitimate expressions of the same. The result of this endeavor has been the demarcation of three categories of the unmarried life, each of which validates singleness to varying extents as dependent on that category’s perceived purpose and value […] These three categories—gifted or called, transitional, and single-again—are generally used to demarcate what the contemporary church considers to be legitimate (i.e., godly) forms of the unmarried Christian life from their illegitimate (i.e., ungodly) counterparts.

Albert Mohler’s teaching provides a helpful insight into the general evangelical discourse on this point. In line with the broader conversation, Mohler argues that there “is no biblical category of enduring singleness, except for the gift of celibacy.”1 While the transitional category of singleness allows for some validation of non-enduring singleness, it must not be used to excuse delayed marriage because “unless given the calling of celibacy, Christians should honor marriage and seek to marry and to move into parenting and the full responsibilities of adulthood earlier rather than later in life.”2 Indeed, Mohler considers the deliberate putting off of marriage to be “the sin [which] I think besets this generation.”3 Such disobedience is usually motivated by and manifested within “simple sloth, personal immaturity, a fear of commitment, or an unbalanced priority given to work and profession. On the part of men, it may also take the shape of a refusal to grow up.”4 In fact, to Mohler’s mind, the prevalence of illegitimate singleness in the church is “primarily a problem that should be laid at the feet of young men.”5 By enjoying prolonged singleness, these young men fail to “grow up, take responsibility, lead, and find the woman God would have them to marry.”6 In so doing they consign innumerable young Christian women to the frustration of prolonged circumstantial singleness.

Mohler further concludes that this “pattern of sin” has “caused any number of ills in the larger society, and in the church.”7 That is to say, delays to marriage result in delays to adulthood (as per the forementioned maturity and sanctification narratives) and both of these lead to “ominous economic, political, and social implications.”8 Interestingly, the “single again” category is largely absent from Mohler’s argumentation. This is likely because the deemed link of marriage as essential to personal and spiritual maturity keeps his primary focus on those who have never married, thus making “marriage a priority in the critical years of young adulthood. In that cause, we have no time to wait.”9

While many evangelical leaders and church communities would deny that they have directly adopted Mohler’s (or other comparable leaders’) rationale, such pervasive devaluation of singleness’ value and purpose is nonetheless endemically and subtly present throughout the evangelical discourse…”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Chapter Three: The Character of Christian Singleness

“… there is little doubt that sex exercises a totalitarian ideological reign over twenty-first-century Western society. It is now seen as both the arena in which the individual is able to publicly and politically express their personal sovereignty and as the methodology by which the authentic inner-self is most truthfully able to be apprehended. Contemporary secular society holds that it is only in discovering and disclosing our innermost sexual inclinations, attractions, desires, actions, and ultimately, our sexual identity (itself the culmination of all these things) that we are able to authentically know ourselves and be known by others. As a consequence, where historically only a small subset of relationships between individuals had been defined in relation to sexual possibility, today all relationships within the vast realm of human interactions are regarded as being potentially complicated, compromised, compounded, or completed by sex.

As one might anticipate (and hope!), Christian discourse has not imported such ideology wholesale. In fact, evangelical thought and practice has largely sought to set itself apart from—and speak as—a corrective to secular sexual mores. And yet, despite such active attempts at differentiation, a number of the foundational implications of contemporary cultural attitudes toward sexuality have still found manifestation within the Christian discourse. The first is located in a heightened alignment between sexual experience and a Christian sense of fully realized personal identity. The contention that men and women have been divinely oriented toward emotional, physical, and sexual intimacy with a person of the opposite sex (in order that they might fulfill one of the chief responsibilities of humanity—“be fruitful and multiply,” Gen 1:28) is a fairly unremarkable and orthodox Christian statement.

However, such understanding of the place of sex within the creative commission has recently found itself increasingly influenced by the secular ideological commitments outlined above. As a result, the historic biblical understanding of sex as designed to serve a particular context (i.e., marriage) for a particular purpose (i.e., marital bonding and procreation) has become increasingly obscured by a preoccupation with sex that Kutter Callaway critically depicts to be “the gateway through which we [Christians] enter ‘the life we love,’ an experience that every man and woman not only desires but also deserves . . . the essential ingredient for an individual’s self-actualization.”1

This quasi-theological development is connected to the positioning of lust as the one temptation which the Christian is truly unable to resist, even with the sanctifying help of the Holy Spirit. Because sexual desire is seen as so necessary to the actualization of an individual’s understanding of their own anthropology, it is supposed that the Christian is simply unable to endlessly say no to engaging in sexual activity. Instead “they can only wait. And the hope is that Christian singles will get married before eventually giving in to the temptation.”2…”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Chapter Two: Singleness in the Church

“According to sociologist and religious studies professor James Davison Hunter, by 1987, the significance of the family had “achieved dimensions perhaps never before seen . . . its survival in the modern world has become perhaps the highest priority on the Evangelical social agenda.”1 The ongoing significance of this theological and ethical narrative means that within contemporary evangelicalism, “to be a good Christian is taken to be inseparable from being a good family man or a good wife and mother.”2

Unfortunately, protagonists who promote this agenda have consistently failed to recognize that in idealizing “the Christian family, the traditional family or traditional family values, they are really referring to the prototypical nineteenth-century bourgeois family,”3 and its remarkably brief reinvention in the middle of the twentieth century. That is, the contemporary concept of the Western nuclear family—as a self-sustaining, internally-focused, and relationally-secluded unit of “togetherness”—is patently different to the expressions of family to be discovered in the pages of both the Old and New Testaments. Of course, in observing this discrepancy we are not thereby compelled to conclude that the nuclear family (as it is understood and enacted in the West today) is necessarily wrong or “unbiblical,” nor that gendered distinctions between men and women or husbands and wives are not part of God’s good creation. And yet, even just a cursory familiarity with the historico-social development of the household over the past few centuries ought to lead us to reject any insistence that these particular cultural formulations are the authentic biblical form we are compelled to recapture and reemulate today. Regardless, twenty-first-century evangelical doggedness seems largely determined to ensure that the “traditional nuclear family” is apprehended as the chief goal of the individual Christian life.

…

Given this historical analysis, it is unsurprising that the contemporary Christian discourse typically regards the unmarried form of life as intrinsically problematic, dysfunctional, and even disordered—that is, a form of otherness. The next two chapters shall undertake a detailed diagnosis of the extent to which this conclusion might be evidenced as accurate…”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Chapter One: Singleness in Society

“In the space of just a couple of centuries, England’s single women had gone from being the romanticized subject of ballads, to women of some economic independence, to inert victims of circumstance, and finally to objects of public ridicule, derision, and even hatred. The dominant discourse which led to this changing narrative was substantially nationalistic in form. As Susan Lanser argues, “The English construction of the old maid is connected to an urgent perceived interest in increasing the British population . . . [and therefore] a dramatic discrediting of the female body that did not reproduce.”1 An artifact of this sentiment is found in the eighteenth-century proverb,

(Image © The Trustees of the British Museum)

Though bizarre to modern ears, within its own historical context this rhyme allied the fruitless old maid with the ape, an animal who was likewise considered to be a pitifully unproductive species (and all of this in contrast to the ripe fertility of dogs and younger maidens!). So it was that “Ape Leader” developed as an alternative designation of scorn for the older unmarried woman. British leadership of that era considered several schemes to decrease the number of its citizens who remained unmarried. These included the proposal of a tax on single individuals, the public auctioning of unmarried women, directories of eligible spinsters and bachelors, and the institution of marital lotteries such as the 1709 Love Lottery: Or, A Woman the Prize.2 By the close of the eighteenth century, Britain’s unmarried, and particularly her never-married women, had truly become problematic and even contemptible figures.

As the societal status of the unmarried woman continued to decline into abject marginality, the standing of her married counterpart enjoyed an opposite fate. In her landmark book Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, Stephanie Coontz observes how, prior to the industrial revolution, the marital relationship “was not primarily about the individual needs and desires of a man and woman and the children that they produced.”3 Throughout most of European history, the domestic household comprised an inclusive grouping of individuals including husband, wife, and children, but also extended family members, apprentices, servants, orphans, and other adults (most notably, spinsters and widows). Furthermore, the family home principally operated as the arena in which outward facing economic and social activity was to be cultivated. All members of the family (including children) were expected to play an important functional role in the domestic production of goods. It was this which secured the family’s place within society while also reciprocally contributing to the well-being of that same society. As a result, spouses within Protestant-influenced Europe “were warned not to love one another too much, and parents prepared themselves and their children for separation . . . [The] family’s image of itself was thin and insubstantial.”4 However, the industrial revolution of the late-eighteenth century brought with it a period of radical change, and this not least in the fostering of an inward facing character of the domestic household…”

Pssst. This full chapter is available for free download here.

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.

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Introduction: Setting the Scene

“In this book I hope to equip you to look with fresh eyes at the intelligibility of God’s purposes for singleness in the lives of his people, and so also the inhabitability of singleness within the community of that same people. An appreciation of this relationship between purpose and place will prove vitally important for the task that lies at hand. After all, a theology of singleness which celebrates purpose but neglects place can only ever be deeply abstracted, and a theology of singleness which embraces place but fails to appreciate purpose can only ever be deeply impoverished. To put it another way, theological purpose imbues the single life with genuine meaning, but pastoral place provides the context in which that meaning is inhabited as genuinely meaningful. This wonderful harmony between the purpose of the unmarried Christian life, undertaken within the place of the Christian community, means that any exploration of Christian singleness is one which will be of vital significance to not just the individual member, but to the body of Christ as a whole.

With this in mind, it might come as somewhat of a surprise to find that the first exploratory steps of this endeavor are not to be taken within the hallowed halls of the church itself, but in the landscape that lies beyond its doors. But, just as it would be reckless to abstract Christian theology from the societal context of the Christian church, so also would it be foolhardy to abstract the church from the broader cultural milieu in which it is located. As a human community, the church exists at a specific moment in human history. It always has and it always will, right up until that final moment when history ends and eternity begins. So it is that a reexamination of Christian singleness in the church of the present, for the sake of her future, is well served by first exploring the broader cultural past which it has responded to, been set against or perhaps even catechized by.”

Taken from The Meaning of Singleness by Danielle Treweek. Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Elizabeth Treweek. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com. This post is public so feel free to share it.